Review: Popkin Dance @ PS21, 8/2/14

CHATHAM – Lionel Popkin has a complicated relationship with Ruth St. Denis.

His new dance, “Ruth Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” which was onstage Friday and Saturday at PS21 in Chatham, grew out of his research into the life and work of the woman best known as the wife and collaborator of Jacob’s Pillow founder Ted Shawn. What Popkin seems to have discovered is an artist who was both groundbreaking and misguided.

The issue that sticks in Popkin’s craw is St. Denis’ cultural appropriation; her most popular dances referenced Indian, Egyptian and Far Eastern imagery and movement—Miss Ruth, as she was known, called them Oriental dances. Unlike Popkin, who is half-Indian, St. Denis—who was born Ruth Dennis on a farm in New Jersey—had no right to claim these traditions. Yet claim them she did, going so far as to create kits for the dances, complete with costumes and step-by-step instructions for performing the steps.

Here’s where things get fuzzy. When it comes to art, can we definitively say where influence ends and appropriation begins? Popkin goes meta with this question, taking liberties, as he informs us beforehand, with St. Denis’ instructions. The result is movement that sometimes parodies the theatricality of her style, and sometimes goes in a completely different direction, as when he and Emily Beattie begin their duet in graceful partnership and progress to pushing and pulling at each other.

Popkin frequently breaks the fourth wall, beginning when he introduces us to the dancers (Beattie, Carolyn Hall and Samantha Mohr). He tells us about the lukewarm reactions he got to the idea of a dance about St. Denis, and thanks his mom for donating her old saris to the production. It feels right for him to be so intimate, particularly because the work is in part a personal exploration of identity.

Popkin clearly likes to question ingrained “truths”; at one point, he shares how a former dance teacher advised him never to make dances that take place lying on the floor. Of course, he’s got more than one like that in “Ruth”—including the opening sequence, a medley of rolling and bumping bodies, with the soles of the dancers’ feet facing the audience.

As for his mother’s saris, the dancers strew them across the floor, along with heaps of other outfits they doff and don, as if asking, Does a costume give you the authority to become someone else, from somewhere else? Composer/accordionist Guy Klucevsek’s score, which he performed live on stage with violinist Mary Rowell, further complicates the issue at hand with its rich layering of Asian and Eastern European inflections. And then there’s the fact that the projected image of St. Denis all in white, moving behind the four dancers as their gloved hands gesture in unison, is simply, un-ironically beautiful.